My Dearest friend Luna,
I have been missing you very much ever since I was taken away from you, my friends and my family. I have missed you all very much. Ever since I was taken and sent to the work at the camp I am currently at. This camp is called Auschwitz I, I am very lucky I was not sent to Auschwitz II, Birkenau also known as the death factoryin Oswiecim Poland, transfers from this camp say there are 7 gas chambers in which up to 6,000 people are being gassed a day with Zyclon-b gas which is mostly cyanide. Also there are 3 crematorium, which are used for burning bodies. Here at our camp, I havent eaten in over 3 days and some of the women here have begun recipe trading. This passes the time and also keeps our mind off of our ever growing hunger. The women are also talking about the medical experiments taking place here. Mrs.Acker's husband was lagging behind on Monday and he was taken to be experimented on. The women are talking about how the experiments are filled with dreadful excrutiating operations. In which almost nobody survives, although those who do survive suffer until they are taken out of their misery. Some of the experiments going on are high pressure freezings, prisoners being infected with diseases and epidemics. There are even cancers being placed in them and muscles and bones being cut and transplanted to other people being experimented on. The sad thing is that these people never did anything to the nazis. Also these are licenced doctors. We were recently taken on our first death march. A death march turned out to be just what I'd expected. We being moved and they decided to make us march through the towns. Thegermans that tried to help us were immediatly punished. If we did not walk fast enough we were whipped, although its hard to avoid it. And if we stopped we were killed. So far some of the elderly have been sent right to the gas chambers because they were unable to work. Luckly I have been working hard enough to keep myself alive. The first day I got here I was given a bowl if I lose this bowl I will have nothing to eat out of they will not give a second one. Also the beds we have to sleep on aren't even like beds they are almost impossible to sleep on! I have to live in fear every day because I might be the next to the gas chamber! I'm also afraid for the little children if they don't work they get gassed at that young of age. I am living in fear here please pray for me as I pray that you stay safe. One of my friends has gotten a very lucky job, cleaning the kitchen. She gets to eat all the leftovers as long as the soldiers aren't watching. I just want to go home by this point. I hope something happens, even if I get to clean the kitchen like Laura it still is miserable being here. I have to write this letter in secret because the gaurds here don't want us "making a plan". But beleive me I just hope you are safe if you are caught, I just don't know what I would do if you weren't there when I get back.
Beds In a concentration camp
Love,
Anna Wesenberg
Rough Draft
My Dearest friend Luna,
I have been missing you very much ever since i was taken away from you, my friends and my family I have missed you all very much ever since I was taken and sent to the work camp I am currently at. This camp is called Auschwitz I, I am very lucky I was not sent to also known as the death factoryin Oswiecim Poland, at this camp there are 7 gas chambers in which up to 6,000 people are being gassed a day with Zyclon-b gas which is mostly cyanide. Also there are 3 crematorium, which are used for burning bodies. I havent eaten in over 3 days and some of the women here have begun recipe trading. This passes the time and also keep our mind off our ever growing hunger. The women are also talking about medical experiments. Mrs.Acker's husband was lagging behind on monday and he was taken and expirimented on. The women are talking about how the experiments are filled with dreadful excrutiating operations. In which almost nobody survived, although those who did suffered until they were taken out of their misery. Some of the expirements going on are high pressure freezings, prisoners being infected with diseases and epidemics. There are even cancers being placed in them and muscles and bones being cut and transplanted to other people being experimented on. The sad thing is that these people never did anything to the nazis. And these are licenced doctors. We were recently taken on our first death march. A death march turned out to be just what I'd expected. We were being moved and they decided to make us march through the towns. Thegermans that tried to help us were immediatly punished. If we did not walk fast enough we were whipped, although its hard to avoid it. And if we stopped we were killed. So far some of the elderly have been sent right to the gas chambers because they were unable to work. Luckly I have been working hard enough to keep myself alive. The first day I got here I was given a bowl if I lose this bowl I will have nothing to eat out of they will not give a second one. Also the beds we have to sleep on aren't even like beds they are almost impossible to sleep on! I have to live in fear every day because I might be the next to the gas chamber! I'm also afraid for the little children if they don't work they get gassed at that young of age. I am living in fear here please pray for me as I pray that you stay safe. One of my friends has gotten a very lucky job, cleaning the kitchen. She gets to eat all the leftovers as long as the soldiers aren't watching. I just want to go home by this point. I hope something happens, even if I get to clean the kitchen like Laura it still is miserable being here. I have to write this letter in secret because the gaurds here don't want us "making a plan". But beleive me I just hope you are safe if you are caught, I just don't know what I would do.
Love,
Anna Wesenberg
This Camp is called Work camps and Extermination Camps
Notes:
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005144
Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany established about 20,000 camps to imprison its many millions of victims. These camps were used for a range of purposes including forced-labor camps, transit camps which served as temporary way stations, and extermination camps built primarily or exclusively for mass murder. Following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Nazis opened forced-labor camps where thousands of prisoners died from exhaustion, starvation, and exposure.
In some camps, Nazi doctors performed medical experiments on prisoners.
the Germans and their collaborators murdered more than three million Jews in the extermination camps alone.
. Chelmno, the first extermination camp, opened in December 1941.to increase killing efficiency and to make the process more impersonal for the perpetrators. At the Auschwitz camp complex, the Birkenau extermination camp had four gas chambers. During the height of deportations to the camp, up to 6,000 Jews were gassed there each day.
Near the end of the war, when Germany's military force was collapsing, the Allied armies closed in on the Nazi concentration camps. The Soviets approached from the east, and the British, French, and Americans from the west. The Germans began frantically to move the prisoners out of the camps near the front and take them to be used as forced laborers in camps inside Germany. Prisoners were first taken by train and then by foot on "death marches," as they became known. Prisoners were forced to march long distances in bitter cold, with little or no food, water, or rest. Those who could not keep up were shot. The largest death marches took place in the winter of 1944-1945, when the Soviet army began its liberation of Poland. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz, the Germans marched 60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward Wodzislaw, a town thirty-five miles away, where they were put on freight trains to other camps. About one in four died on the way.
FOOD Food, or the lack of it, dominated the consciousness of the concentration camp prisoner. As one survivor clarified: "We have a calendar in Birkenau. It is hunger.... Morning is hunger. Afternoon is hunger. Evening is hunger."
To be sure, nothing but food could satisfy their physical hunger and counteract severe malnutrition, but recipe sharing had its salutary effects. Ironically, "food talk," especially the exchange of recipes, boosted women's sense of community. As women recollected recipes, they taught one another the art of cooking and baking, and, in the process of teaching, they reclaimed their importance and dignity.
Pseudo-medical experiments were carried out in a number of camps. Prior to World War II governments routinely used vulnerable populations for experimentation, but German physicians operated without limits and with routine disregard for the humanity of those upon whom they experimented. Even before World War II interned Jews had been used for pseudo-biological "race research." Upon Himmler's initiative, unlimited supplies of live men and women were put at the disposal of the SS medical organization for the purpose of "medical" experiments in the camps and outside. Under the program of the biological destruction of the "inferior races", Viktor Brack, who had also been one of the heads of the Euthanasia Program, was charged in 1941 with developing a quick system of sterilizing between 2,000,000 and 3,000,000 Jews who were fit for work. The logic was simple: if Jews could be sterilized, then the imposition of the "Final Solution" would take but a generation as there would be no danger of their reproducing and perpetuating the Jewish people. In the interim, the German people could enjoy the benefits of their labor. The Brack system, employed in Auschwitz by Horst Schumann, consisted of the irradiation of the reproductive organs of men and women. Another system was also tested in Auschwitz by Karl Clauberg, who, during the gynecological examination of women, injected them with matter, which burned out the womb. Gerhard Madaus and Ernst Koch worked on the development of an herbal means of sterilization, using Caladium seguinum; Gypsies were used as guinea pigs. August Hirt worked on shrinking skulls for his collection at the anatomical institute at Strasbourg, for the purposes of "racial research." The "specimens" were put to death at Natzweiler. Upon orders received from the air force, experiments subjecting humans to conditions of high pressure and freezing were held at Dachau, to investigate the possibilities of the survival of pilots. In the name of "medical research", humans were infected with contagious diseases and epidemics, in order to try out new drugs and poisons. The SS doctors also amputated bones and cut muscles for transplantation purposes; they removed internal organs and introduced cancer into human bodies. Those victims who did not die immediately were left to perish from neglect and agony. Some of them survived, crippled or maimed for life.
In November 1943, Dr. Josef Mengele became the chief physician of Birkenau. Mengele wanted to "prove" the superiority of the Nordic race. His first experiments were performed on gypsy children supplied to him from the so-called kindergarten. Before long he expanded his interest to twins, dwarfs, and persons with abnormalities.
Mengele subjected his experimental group to all possible medical analyses that could be performed while the victims were alive. The tests he performed were painful, exhausting, and traumatic for the frightened and hungry children who made up the bulk his subjects.
The twins and the crippled persons designated as subjects of experiments were photographed, their jaws and teeth cast in plaster molds, fingerprints were taken from hands and legs. On Mengele's instructions, an inmate painter made comparative drawings of the shapes of heads, auricles, noses, mouths, hands, and legs of the twins.
When the research was completed some subjects were killed by phenol injections and their organs were autopsied and analyzed. Scientifically interesting anatomical specimens were preserved and shipped out to the Institute in Berlin-Dahlem for further research.
On the day he left Auschwitz, January 17, 1945, Mengele took with him the documentation of his experiments. He still imagined that they would bring him scientific honor.
The concentration camps were used during the holocaust to eliminate the Jews. The Nazis worked at the camps and ordered the Jews around and they took them from their families transported them to these camps in which they were killed at in cruel ways they had gas chambers and Furnesses they burned them into ashes in. They treated them worse then then they treat murderers that are now in jail they barely fed them they had no sympathey. The Nazis that abused them only did so because they thought they were better than them. One unit of transportation to camps are dirty old smelly box-carts. There are two types of camps work and extermenation though somtimes they combine the two and if you don't work you get exterminated for me that would be a nightmare and that is pretty much what these places are they were dreadful!
The largest death camp was located in Oswiecim Poland and was called Auschwitz-Birkenau nicknamed the death factory
about 4 mil. people(max) were killed there
There are up to seven gas chambers in the camp that used Zyclon-b gas which is basically just cyanide
There were also crematoriums(3) which were use for burning bodies
My Dearest friend Luna,
I have been missing you very much ever since I was taken away from you, my friends and my family. I have missed you all very much. Ever since I was taken and sent to the work at the camp I am currently at. This camp is called Auschwitz I, I am very lucky I was not sent to Auschwitz II, Birkenau also known as the death factory in Oswiecim Poland, transfers from this camp say there are 7 gas chambers in which up to 6,000 people are being gassed a day with Zyclon-b gas which is mostly cyanide. Also there are 3 crematorium, which are used for burning bodies. Here at our camp, I havent eaten in over 3 days and some of the women here have begun recipe trading. This passes the time and also keeps our mind off of our ever growing hunger. The women are also talking about the medical experiments taking place here. Mrs.Acker's husband was lagging behind on Monday and he was taken to be experimented on. The women are talking about how the experiments are filled with dreadful excrutiating operations. In which almost nobody survives, although those who do survive suffer until they are taken out of their misery. Some of the experiments going on are high pressure freezings, prisoners being infected with diseases and epidemics. There are even cancers being placed in them and muscles and bones being cut and transplanted to other people being experimented on. The sad thing is that these people never did anything to the nazis. Also these are licenced doctors. We were recently taken on our first death march. A death march turned out to be just what I'd expected. We being moved and they decided to make us march through the towns. The germans that tried to help us were immediatly punished. If we did not walk fast enough we were whipped, although its hard to avoid it. And if we stopped we were killed.
So far some of the elderly have been sent right to the gas chambers because they were unable to work. Luckly I have been working hard enough to keep myself alive. The first day I got here I was given a bowl if I lose this bowl I will have nothing to eat out of they will not give a second one. Also the beds we have to sleep on aren't even like beds they are almost impossible to sleep on! I have to live in fear every day because I might be the next to the gas chamber! I'm also afraid for the little children if they don't work they get gassed at that young of age. I am living in fear here please pray for me as I pray that you stay safe. One of my friends has gotten a very lucky job, cleaning the kitchen. She gets to eat all the leftovers as long as the soldiers aren't watching. I just want to go home by this point. I hope something happens, even if I get to clean the kitchen like Laura it still is miserable being here. I have to write this letter in secret because the gaurds here don't want us "making a plan". But beleive me I just hope you are safe if you are caught, I just don't know what I would do if you weren't there when I get back.
Love,
Anna Wesenberg
Rough Draft
My Dearest friend Luna,
I have been missing you very much ever since i was taken away from you, my friends and my family I have missed you all very much ever since I was taken and sent to the work camp I am currently at. This camp is called Auschwitz I, I am very lucky I was not sent to also known as the death factory in Oswiecim Poland, at this camp there are 7 gas chambers in which up to 6,000 people are being gassed a day with Zyclon-b gas which is mostly cyanide. Also there are 3 crematorium, which are used for burning bodies. I havent eaten in over 3 days and some of the women here have begun recipe trading. This passes the time and also keep our mind off our ever growing hunger. The women are also talking about medical experiments. Mrs.Acker's husband was lagging behind on monday and he was taken and expirimented on. The women are talking about how the experiments are filled with dreadful excrutiating operations. In which almost nobody survived, although those who did suffered until they were taken out of their misery. Some of the expirements going on are high pressure freezings, prisoners being infected with diseases and epidemics. There are even cancers being placed in them and muscles and bones being cut and transplanted to other people being experimented on. The sad thing is that these people never did anything to the nazis. And these are licenced doctors. We were recently taken on our first death march. A death march turned out to be just what I'd expected. We were being moved and they decided to make us march through the towns. The germans that tried to help us were immediatly punished. If we did not walk fast enough we were whipped, although its hard to avoid it. And if we stopped we were killed.
So far some of the elderly have been sent right to the gas chambers because they were unable to work. Luckly I have been working hard enough to keep myself alive. The first day I got here I was given a bowl if I lose this bowl I will have nothing to eat out of they will not give a second one. Also the beds we have to sleep on aren't even like beds they are almost impossible to sleep on! I have to live in fear every day because I might be the next to the gas chamber! I'm also afraid for the little children if they don't work they get gassed at that young of age. I am living in fear here please pray for me as I pray that you stay safe. One of my friends has gotten a very lucky job, cleaning the kitchen. She gets to eat all the leftovers as long as the soldiers aren't watching. I just want to go home by this point. I hope something happens, even if I get to clean the kitchen like Laura it still is miserable being here. I have to write this letter in secret because the gaurds here don't want us "making a plan". But beleive me I just hope you are safe if you are caught, I just don't know what I would do.
Love,
Anna Wesenberg
This Camp is called Work camps and Extermination Camps
Notes:
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005144
Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany established about 20,000 camps to imprison its many millions of victims. These camps were used for a range of purposes including forced-labor camps, transit camps which served as temporary way stations, and extermination camps built primarily or exclusively for mass murder.
Following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Nazis opened forced-labor camps where thousands of prisoners died from exhaustion, starvation, and exposure.
In some camps, Nazi doctors performed medical experiments on prisoners.
the Germans and their collaborators murdered more than three million Jews in the extermination camps alone.
. Chelmno, the first extermination camp, opened in December 1941.to increase killing efficiency and to make the process more impersonal for the perpetrators. At the Auschwitz camp complex, the Birkenau extermination camp had four gas chambers. During the height of deportations to the camp, up to 6,000 Jews were gassed there each day.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/marches.html
Near the end of the war, when Germany's military force was collapsing, the Allied armies closed in on the Nazi concentration camps. The Soviets approached from the east, and the British, French, and Americans from the west. The Germans began frantically to move the prisoners out of the camps near the front and take them to be used as forced laborers in camps inside Germany. Prisoners were first taken by train and then by foot on "death marches," as they became known. Prisoners were forced to march long distances in bitter cold, with little or no food, water, or rest. Those who could not keep up were shot. The largest death marches took place in the winter of 1944-1945, when the Soviet army began its liberation of Poland. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz, the Germans marched 60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward Wodzislaw, a town thirty-five miles away, where they were put on freight trains to other camps. About one in four died on the way.
FOOD
Food, or the lack of it, dominated the consciousness of the concentration camp prisoner. As one survivor clarified: "We have a calendar in Birkenau. It is hunger.... Morning is hunger. Afternoon is hunger. Evening is hunger."
To be sure, nothing but food could satisfy their physical hunger and counteract severe malnutrition, but recipe sharing had its salutary effects. Ironically, "food talk," especially the exchange of recipes, boosted women's sense of community. As women recollected recipes, they taught one another the art of cooking and baking, and, in the process of teaching, they reclaimed their importance and dignity.
Pseudo-medical experiments were carried out in a number of camps. Prior to World War II governments routinely used vulnerable populations for experimentation, but German physicians operated without limits and with routine disregard for the humanity of those upon whom they experimented. Even before World War II interned Jews had been used for pseudo-biological "race research." Upon Himmler's initiative, unlimited supplies of live men and women were put at the disposal of the SS medical organization for the purpose of "medical" experiments in the camps and outside. Under the program of the biological destruction of the "inferior races", Viktor Brack, who had also been one of the heads of the Euthanasia Program, was charged in 1941 with developing a quick system of sterilizing between 2,000,000 and 3,000,000 Jews who were fit for work. The logic was simple: if Jews could be sterilized, then the imposition of the "Final Solution" would take but a generation as there would be no danger of their reproducing and perpetuating the Jewish people. In the interim, the German people could enjoy the benefits of their labor. The Brack system, employed in Auschwitz by Horst Schumann, consisted of the irradiation of the reproductive organs of men and women. Another system was also tested in Auschwitz by Karl Clauberg, who, during the gynecological examination of women, injected them with matter, which burned out the womb. Gerhard Madaus and Ernst Koch worked on the development of an herbal means of sterilization, using Caladium seguinum; Gypsies were used as guinea pigs. August Hirt worked on shrinking skulls for his collection at the anatomical institute at Strasbourg, for the purposes of "racial research." The "specimens" were put to death at Natzweiler. Upon orders received from the air force, experiments subjecting humans to conditions of high pressure and freezing were held at Dachau, to investigate the possibilities of the survival of pilots. In the name of "medical research", humans were infected with contagious diseases and epidemics, in order to try out new drugs and poisons. The SS doctors also amputated bones and cut muscles for transplantation purposes; they removed internal organs and introduced cancer into human bodies. Those victims who did not die immediately were left to perish from neglect and agony. Some of them survived, crippled or maimed for life.
In November 1943, Dr. Josef Mengele became the chief physician of Birkenau. Mengele wanted to "prove" the superiority of the Nordic race. His first experiments were performed on gypsy children supplied to him from the so-called kindergarten. Before long he expanded his interest to twins, dwarfs, and persons with abnormalities.
Mengele subjected his experimental group to all possible medical analyses that could be performed while the victims were alive. The tests he performed were painful, exhausting, and traumatic for the frightened and hungry children who made up the bulk his subjects.
The twins and the crippled persons designated as subjects of experiments were photographed, their jaws and teeth cast in plaster molds, fingerprints were taken from hands and legs. On Mengele's instructions, an inmate painter made comparative drawings of the shapes of heads, auricles, noses, mouths, hands, and legs of the twins.
When the research was completed some subjects were killed by phenol injections and their organs were autopsied and analyzed. Scientifically interesting anatomical specimens were preserved and shipped out to the Institute in Berlin-Dahlem for further research.
On the day he left Auschwitz, January 17, 1945, Mengele took with him the documentation of his experiments. He still imagined that they would bring him scientific honor.
The concentration camps were used during the holocaust to eliminate the Jews. The Nazis worked at the camps and ordered the Jews around and they took them from their families transported them to these camps in which they were killed at in cruel ways they had gas chambers and Furnesses they burned them into ashes in. They treated them worse then then they treat murderers that are now in jail they barely fed them they had no sympathey. The Nazis that abused them only did so because they thought they were better than them. One unit of transportation to camps are dirty old smelly box-carts. There are two types of camps work and extermenation though somtimes they combine the two and if you don't work you get exterminated for me that would be a nightmare and that is pretty much what these places are they were dreadful!